


Strange Meeting

by draculard



Category: Star Wars: Thrawn Series - Timothy Zahn (2017)
Genre: Angst, Chemical warfare, Enemy Soldiers, Ghosts, Hallucinations, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, No spoilers for Treason, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sharing a foxhole, Shell Shock, World War I, great war au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-07-21 04:09:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19995631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: The dead soldier is standing at the foot of Eli's bed, and nobody else seems to see.





	Strange Meeting

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from the Wilfred Owens poem of the same name, particularly inspired by the last verse:
> 
> “I am the enemy you killed, my friend.  
> I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned  
> Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.  
> I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.  
> Let us sleep now. . . .”

More than anything, he remembers the blue tint to the corpse’s skin, but sometimes other details creep into place when he least expects it. The blood pooling in the enemy soldier’s open eyes. The damage to his uniform — the telltale burnt fabric and charred flesh from a nearby explosion on his chest and abdomen; the foreign insignia which Eli knows means that this man, whoever he was, must be an officer.

The dead soldier is standing at the foot of his bed, and nobody else seems to see.

* * *

He wakes in the field hospital with the chemical sting of gas in his nose and the taste of rubber in his mouth. He can still feel the mask clinging to his sweat-slick face, his breath fogging up the glass, obscuring his vision from one side while yellow clouds obscure it from the other. For just a moment, the mattress beneath him feels like hard, frozen ground.

And then the illusion fades.

The mask is gone. He smells nothing but antiseptic and blood. 

The mattress is just a mattress.

* * *

Delusions are common, they say. There are men in the bunks near him who lay unblinking, in catatonic states, and there are men who act like infants unable to speak or tie their shoes, and there are men, like Eli, who are completely normal until they see something that isn’t really there.

Shell shock, the doctors say. But it’s not. What he’s seeing — what all these men are seeing — are ghosts.

He’s alone in that foxhole with an enemy soldier for an eternity while the shells rain down overhead. Both of them injured, both of them unarmed, and the other man (taller than Eli, stronger than Eli) makes no move to harm him.

He offers Eli a hand-rolled cigarette, their fingers brushing. He takes the match from Eli's shaking hand and leans forward, lighting the cigarette clenched between Eli's lips. He does not smoke himself.

He shares his coffee.

And when—

But Eli can’t think of that. He thinks of that, and the ghost shows up again, standing right next to him by the bed with that death-stained skin, those bloody eyes, the smell of chemical gas rolling off him and stinging Eli’s nose.

Eli looks for a name plaque on the soldier's chest. He doesn’t find one.

He still doesn’t know the soldier’s name.

* * *

The life of a merchant apprentice pre-wartime is all Eli has ever needed. It gives him what scarce travel he desires; it gives him long lists he can sink his teeth into, numbers and patterns he can get so lost in that the entire outside world disappears.

And he has exotic coffee beans, and fine tobacco, and foreign chocolates, and the warmest, driest socks.

Later, it’s the socks he misses most, but he would give a limb for the rest of it, too. Anything to feel warm and dry and normal again. There may be shells, there may be bullets, there may be men caught in barbed wire waiting for the guns to tear them down — but one sip of coffee, no matter how foul, and Eli can pretend he’s back in his parents’ little cottage by the general store, that he’s sitting at the window looking out into the garden and taking his evening tea.

It isn’t raining when he’s trapped in that foxhole, but the ground is still muddy and the ice at the bottom is melting, so it isn’t exactly dry. Despite this — despite the gunshot wound on his upper arm and the cold seeping up through his trousers — he feels almost normal.

It’s the bitter taste of coffee on his tongue. It’s the cigarette smoke warming his lungs.

It’s the — but he can’t think of that and what came after. He can’t allow the thought to enter his mind. He can remember the shells, he can remember how he jumped at the sound when one of them hit nearby, but he can’t remember anything else.

He won’t.

When he opens his eyes, the dead soldier is looking down at him again.

* * *

“I’d give you the mask,” Eli says. His voice is rasping, barely audible. A pathetic thing to hear. The other men are sleeping, or wrangling with their own delusions, and none of them look his way. The nurse on duty is gone from her post — to tend to a patient? To the latrine? To fetch a doctor?

Does she see the enemy soldier, too?

“I’d give you the mask,” Eli says again, and he reaches for the enemy soldier’s fingers, but before he can reach them, a horrible, cold memory floods his brain and he falters. He falls back. He doesn’t want to know what’s waiting for him there, disguised as skin.

“I’d give it to you if you wanted,” Eli says, and the dead soldier says nothing. 

“My arm burns,” Eli says. “My gunshot wound. You saw it. The gas got in; it burns.”

And, “I would have given you the mask. I would have. I didn’t want it, either.”

And, “You should’ve kept it.”

And, voice failing, “It was yours.”

* * *

The dead soldier’s face gives nothing away. There are minuscule blood drops on his lower lashes, too small to break free yet, not heavy enough to roll down his face. Up close like this, Eli can see the metal fragments embedded in his chest.

Would it have been permanent damage? He doesn’t think so. Each piece is small, insignificant, like a wooden splinter or a little shard of glass. The burns look painful, yes, but perhaps not deadly if they’d been treated in time. And no matter how he looks at it, the soldier had lived for three hours in that foxhole, his movements stiff but graceful all the time, no sign of pain on his face. 

He’d been strong, Eli _knew_ he was. Even at the end.

He’d shared his coffee. He’d given Eli as many cigarettes as he could smoke. He’d given Eli bandages for his arm, bandages which looked like they’d been torn from a uniform just like the one he’d been wearing. And he’d smiled softly when the shells came down, and he’d been so calm when the foxhole filled with gas.

He’d had his gas mask.

Eli hadn’t.

And yet it’s Eli lying in the hospital bed at night with all the other broken soldiers, his gunshot wound burning from exposure, his lungs and eyes working fine.

* * *

Eli has no photos in his wallet, no sweetheart waiting for him at home. He has a letter from his parents, folded neatly, and he shows it to the enemy soldier. The enemy soldier — handsome, then, before the gas came — takes it gingerly, careful not to stain it with mud, and examines the writing carefully, though it must be inscrutable to him.

He flips the stationery over and the enemy soldier goes still, eyes fixed on the simple graphite sketch there. His fingers, long and thin and graceful, trace over every line with something near to reverence.

Embarrassed, Eli tries to snatch the letter back. The enemy soldier resists, turning away so Eli’s hand falls uselessly against his arm — but there’s nothing special about the drawing. It’s just what Eli can remember of his garden: the stone wall, the summer snowflakes and Dorset heath, the wild onions coming through.

He’d sketched it out in the trenches, too wired to sleep, trying to ignore the screams.

The enemy soldier doesn’t give the letter back — not yet — but he hands Eli his own wallet to examine, and there are no pictures there, either, nor are there any thrice-folded letters from home. Eli dutifully looks through every flap, uninterested, and hands it back, and then the enemy soldier hands him something else.

A journal, fat and hand-bound and filled with illegible foreign cursive. Filled with sketches, too, of soldiers in enemy uniforms at rest, in formation, cleaning their guns, playing cards and smoking and hiding their faces in their hands. He sees sketches of barbed wire — of exploded shells — of empty boots — of weaponry and ammunition discarded in a pile.

He looks up and meets the enemy soldier’s eyes, sees how desperately he clutches Eli’s letter. Careful not to wrinkle it but refusing to let go, the page of foreign writing turned to face the mud, the shitty little sketch of Eli’s garden facing up.

There are no flowers in the enemy soldier’s journal.

* * *

And then it happens, the thing Eli can’t think about. The shell comes whistling down and impacts so close to the foxhole that for just a moment, Eli is sure they’re dead. Chunks of earth spray high into the air and rain into the pit, hard from the ice, possibly deadly if they hit anyone in the head. The enemy soldier, moving quickly, folds Eli’s drawing up and tucks it into his breast pocket.

And Eli jumps, the noise of the shell frightening him.

And the enemy soldier, without hesitation, comforts him.

He takes Eli’s hand. He squeezes. His hand is callused and warm.

He doesn’t let go.

* * *

It’s an hour later when the gas comes. Or maybe it’s three. This part, for some reason, Eli can think of. This part he can remember without wincing.

The yellow, near-transparent clouds descending into the pit. Eli, frozen, only watches. The enemy soldier, sitting next to him in the mud, is faster. He unclips his gas mask from his belt and raises it, and Eli thinks, _That’s it, then. This is it._

And he feels no resentment. This is war, and they’re both injured, and they’re both stuck here in the ground. But the enemy soldier is stronger, he is taller, and he still has his gas mask. And Eli is small, and weak, and he lost his mask somewhere on the battlefield and hadn’t bothered going back.

He thinks: _At least I had some coffee before I died. At least I can still taste that cigarette on my tongue._

But what he’s really thinking, what he refuses to put into words even in his own brain, is: _At least I got to touch somebody one last time_.

Then the gas is upon them. The enemy soldier shoves his own mask over Eli’s head. He feels suddenly weightless, suddenly disoriented and blind, and he realizes he’s being lifted as far as the enemy soldier can lift him, and Eli’s senses snap back into place and he scrabbles at the muddy walls of the foxhole until he finds a foothold. His fingers clench on semi-solid dirt; what isn’t melted is still slick with ice. The enemy soldier, now barely able to reach him, gives him one last push, forcing Eli to pull his feet over the edge whether he wants to or not.

He doesn’t think, _No,_ then.

He doesn’t think, _Not me. You._

Eli pulls himself out of the foxhole and finds the entire battlefield flooded with gas, adrenaline making his arms shake so badly he thinks he won’t make it all the way up. The shells have gone silent. The gunfire has, too. He takes a breath, feels gas leaking through the rubber seal, and realizes he has to find high ground. It doesn’t escape his notice that only now, only when the very air itself is poisonous, is it safe for him to come out.

But first he presses himself low in the dirt and reaches as far into the pit as he can. Through the mask, all sound is muffled — can he hear choking? Can he hear someone crying for help, or is the enemy soldier already silent? Can he see someone lying there in the dirt, so far away that Eli has no hope of reaching?

Nobody grabs his hand.

* * *

He sees the strange blue tint to the enemy soldier’s skin. He sees the blood pooling in his eyes. He sees the officer’s insignia and thinks, _He had men waiting for him somewhere. Even if he didn’t have a family, he had his men._

And the dead soldier stands by his hospital bed, Eli’s sketch of Dorset heath and summer snowflakes tucked against his chest, and gives Eli the same soft smile he gave when that last shell fell.


End file.
